How I Learned to Shut Up

Folks who met me at ISTE quickly discovered that I am pretty loud. However, that’s a recent phenomenon for me and the unspoken part of the conference was that I often left the conversation with the incessant cycle of: did I ask too many questions? Was I monopolizing the conversation? Do I laugh too loud at my own jokes?

Then I want to hide.

I didn’t learn this at home.

I didn’t learn this from friends.

I learned this at school.

When teachers used to say, “You’ll need this in the real world,” my response was almost always, “then what kind of fantasy land is this?”

2 thoughts on “How I Learned to Shut Up”

I hope we can populate the Teachers’ Stories section with more of our school narratives, or perhaps with some podcasts capturing conversations like ours at Nodding Head. I think unlearning and disbelieving what school said about us is part of our journey in learning about our students.